A mixed-content document can be organized to display a combination of text, images, headers, sidebars, or any other elements that are typically dimensioned and arranged to display information to a reader in a coherent, informative, and visually aesthetic manner. Mixed-content documents can be in printed or electronic form. Examples of mixed-content documents include articles, flyers, business cards, newsletters, website displays, brochures, single or multi page advertisements, envelopes, and magazine covers just to name a few. In order to design a layout for a mixed-content document, a document designer selects for each page of the document a number of elements, element dimensions, spacing between elements called “white space,” font size and style for text, background, colors, and an arrangement of the elements.
In recent years, advances in computing devices have accelerated the growth and development of software-based document layout design tools and, as a result, increased the efficiency with which mixed-content documents can be produced. A first type of design tool uses a set of gridlines that can be seen in the document design process but are invisible to the document reader. The gridlines are used to align elements on a page, allow for flexibility by enabling a designer to position elements within a document, and even allow a designer to extend portions of elements outside of the guidelines, depending on how much variation the designer would like to incorporate into the document layout. A second type of document layout design tool is a template. Typical design tools present a document designer with a variety of different templates to choose from for each page of the document. FIG. 1 shows an example of a template 100 for a single page of a mixed-content document. The template 100 includes two image fields 101 and 102, three text fields 104-106, and a header field 108. The text, image, and header fields are separated by white spaces. A white space is a blank region of a template separating two fields, such as white space 110 separating image field 101 from text field 105. A designer can select the template 100 from a set of other templates, input image data to fill the image fields 101 and text data to fill the text fields 104-106 and the header 108.
However, many steps in organizing and determining an overall layout of an entire document continue to require numerous tasks that have to be completed by the document designer. For example, it is often the case that the dimensions of template fields are fixed, making it difficult for document designers to resize images and arrange text to fill particular fields creating image and text overflows, cropping, or other unpleasant scaling issues. FIG. 2 shows the template 100 where two images, represented by dashed-line boxes 201 and 202, are selected for display in the image fields 101 and 102. As shown in the example of FIG. 2, the images 201 and 202 do not fit appropriately within the boundaries of the image fields 101 and 102. With regard to the image 201, a design tool may be configured to crop the image 201 to fit within the boundaries of the image field 101 by discarding peripheral, but visually import, portions of the image 201, or the design tool may attempt to fit the image 201 within the image field 101 by rescaling the aspect ratio of the image 201, resulting in a visually displeasing distorted image 201. Because image 202 fits within the boundaries of image field 102 with room to spare, white spaces 204 and 206 separating the image 202 from the text fields 104 and 106 exceed the size of the white spaces separating other elements in the template 100 resulting in a visually distracting uneven distribution of the elements. The design tool may attempt to correct for this problem by rescaling the aspect ratio of the image 202 to fit within the boundaries of the image field 102, also resulting in a visually displeasing distorted image 202.
Document designers and users of document-layout software continue to seek enhancements in document layout design methods and systems.